Digital images and video frames are compressed in order to reduce data storage and transmission requirements. In most image compression methods, certain image data is discarded selectively to reduce the amount of data needed to represent the image while avoiding substantial degradation of the appearance of the image.
Transform coding is a common image compression method that involves representing an image by a set of transform coefficients. The transform coefficients are quantized individually to reduce the amount of data that is needed to represent the image. A representation of the original image is generated by applying an inverse transform to the transform coefficients. Block transform is coding is a common type of transform coding method. In a typical block transform coding process, an image is divided into small rectangular regions (or “blocks”), which are subjected to forward transform, quantization and coding operations. Many different kinds of block transforms may be used to encode the blocks. Among the common types of block transforms are the cosine transform (which is the most common), the Fourier transform, the Hadamard transform, and the Haar wavelet transform. These transforms produce an M×N array of transform coefficients from an M×N block of image data, where M and N have integer values of at least 1.
The quality of an image often is degraded by a block transform coding process. For example, discontinuities often are introduced at the block boundaries in the reconstructed image and ringing artifacts often are introduced near image boundaries.
Different approaches have been proposed for enhancing compressed images by reducing the appearance of artifacts introduced by block transform coding processes. Among the most common image enhancement approaches are approaches that filter along block boundaries, approaches that optimize by projecting onto convex sets, and approaches that perform wavelet transform thresholding. Another approach for enhancing compressed images involves the reapplication of shifted JEPG transforms to a JPEG image. In particular, this approach re-applies the JPEG compression operator to shifted versions of the already-compressed image and averages all of the resulting images to produce an enhanced output image.